Hi Joe,
Fact Tables: Data in a warehouse comes from the transactions. Fact table in a data warehouse consists of facts and/or measures. The nature of data in a fact table is usually numerical. e.g. If I want to know the number of resources used for a task, my fact table will store the actual measure (of resources) while my Dimension table will store the task and resource details.
Candidate check : Binning process when creates the binned indexes, answers only some queries. The base data is not checked. The process of checking the base data is called as a candidate check. Candidate check at times may consume more time that binning process. This depends on the user query and how well it matches with the bin.
You can learn more on these topics through an E BOOK "
THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL DATA MODELING TOOLKIT " available at
ORACLE OLAP